Mario Aguilar

Leo Tolstoy couldn't have possibly known that the war between competing ereaders would result in the mucking up of his magnum opus. Ars Technica reports that in a budget Nook version of War and Peace, every instance of the word "Kindled" has been replaced by "Nookd."

The "Nookd" problem with the $1.00 version of War and Peace was first observed by reader Philip Howard who wrote about it on his blog. Curse Barnes and Noble! Not so fast. The flawed edition of Tolstoy's work probably had nothing to do with the book retailer, and more likely resulted from some lazy find-and-replace work by the company that served the book up for sale, Superior Formatting Publishing. According to Ars Technica:

The best explanation, we think, comes from a commenter on the blog, who says "This obviously wasn't done by Barnes & Noble, but by the publisher who submitted the book to Barnes & Noble. They created a Kindle version of this public domain book first, realized they used 'Kindle' somewhere in their submission, and did a quick find-and-replace to change 'Kindle' to 'Nook'-never once thinking it would affect the book's text rather than just whatever they put in the title page."

Oops! It's great that a digital version of basically any public domain classic is available for a song, but be very careful: Don't use them for a book report without consulting the master text. [Ocrkacoke Island Journal via Ars Technica via Dvice via Yahoo]